My romantic orientation is weird

This may be oversharing, but I feel underrepresented, so...

I'm arospec. Happy Arospec Awareness Week 2026! I assume you can look up the words that you don't know, but indeed, many are like, ten years old. The concepts, as they exist, probably aren't, but the innate nature of romantic attraction is probably beyond the scope of what I want to write about.

And why am I writing this? Because I feel isolated by being in some weird subcategory of subcategories.

"Arospec" often seems insufficient as a word for communicating what I want. I can attempt to clarify with various microlabels: aroflux, nebularomantic, demiromantic. These only approximate how I actually feel about people, though.

In a less allonormative world, perhaps something like "amatodivergent" would make more sense than "arospec". I feel like I need diagrams to pinpoint something, but rather than do that, I shall actually describe what I want and what I don't want.

First, let's establish my sexual orientation, because that's easy: polysexual. I am "just" sexually attracted to some people, with no substantial deviation from what you'd expect there. However, aroallo people are considered not the norm within a broader, hazily defined community of mostly aroace folks. Not being the norm (especially in a context of non-normative sexual and romantic orientations) is not inherently marginalizing, though.

So what from there? I think a lot stems from my particular neurodivergence. For clarity, it's considered "autism", and might also fall under undiagnosed ADHD. Some of my thoughts come from innate sensitivity to stimuli, and others are about the social context that disability brings. I know this feels abstract at the moment, but that's often just how I think anyways.

More concretely, the concept of "relationship anarchy" is simply how I imagine ideal social relationships. I am very uncomfortable inflicting some arbitrary burden of lack of autonomy to someone's life. I know there are practical reasons behind this, but it feels like playing the video game Crusader Kings to me more than actual, real-world bonding. I always just found the whole "jealousy" thing weird, which perhaps should have indicated something to me sooner.

Just a preference for some theoretically open-ended relationship does not quite establish the entire context for my romantic orientation though. There's also the matter of affective preferences, where things truly start to get out there. Let's enumerate them:

• Emotional proximity: usually wanted.
• Physical proximity: sometimes wanted, for very specific people, but highly variable.
• Standard physical intimacy (hugging, making out, etc.): again, wanted for a subset of people who I am emotionally close to, theoretically, sometimes, varying by the hour or so on some days.
• Like, actual sex: okay theoretically but I have a lot of baggage here and would probably require someone who I already trusted and perhaps I can't really elaborate further without being uncomfortable.

This is the "aroflux" part, and perhaps the other microlabels as well. All of these are qualified by other people's boundaries, which I intensely do not want to violate.

From there, I guess we zoom slightly out, and look at the social aspects that I am okay or not okay with, and even some things that I really want:

• I'm disabled, and can't really function on my own for daily tasks. Having a broader support network in general helps me.
• I want to live with people I trust and can help at least emotionally. While I have family, their own interests and autonomy have to be respected.
• If I don't live with someone, but I want to support them, I'm still going to try my best.
• Just talking to people sometimes is enough to keep me going for a day or two.
• While I don't like the concept of ownership or bondage implied by "normal" relational structures, I do like the stability of ceremony and, to an extent, formality.
• I need a variable amount of emotional commitment and distance in any relationship, and I expect the same thing for any partner(s).

I sometimes question if the type of relationships I am seeking are even "romantic", but perhaps even queerplatonic or "alterous".

So that's like nearly 700 words for something that I am forced to compress to one to four for the sake of brevity. If I somehow felt like making an online dating profile or something, it would probably be a novella.

The point is that I exist.